That would be unfair to Rattle, who turned the aural magic to real expressive use. In the case of Ligeti’s masterpiece, he gave the music an unsuspected pathos by making it hover constantly on the edge of extinction. And what a great coup de théâtre it was, to conduct all the empty bars at the end of Ligeti’s piece (with the audience straining to tell whether the orchestra really had stopped playing, or simply was playing too quietly to be heard), so as to lead into the bright A major of Lohengrin’s Prelude. That simple device gave Wagner’s piece a subtly different flavour.

Turning aural nuance into expressive refinement takes time, and often Rattle seemed to suspend the beat, so we could enter into a passing exquisite moment and savour it. He did the same in Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, but here there are no exquisite moments, just gaunt gestures perched on the edge of silence, or great grinding dissonances which seemed to take for ever to resolve. The effect of Rattle’s meditative pauses was startling.

Normally we expect performance to soften a piece’s strangeness, round off its edges, clarify its logic. This performance had the opposite effect, making Sibelius’s symphony more enigmatic that ever – which ultimately felt frustrating.

Once back into the light, with Debussy and Ravel, the performances felt on safer ground. Rattle’s lingering over the quieter episodes in Debussy’s ballet brought out all the shy tenderness of the piece, and its flirtatiousness. And in Ravel’s Daphnis Suite, the astounding, not-quite-believable delicacy of the opening was offset by some enjoyably characterful playing in the Danse, particularly from principal clarinetist Walter Seyfarth.

Hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer and all the Proms live on BBC Radio 3